I was recently interviewed by Jack Sweeney for his podcast series called CFO Thought Leader. This was the fourth time I was interviewed by Sweeney, and I enjoyed our conversation once again. I believe you will find the conversation interesting and relevant.

Here are some of the questions addressed in this podcast. (You can listen via the Youtube window on this page, you can download the file or find the iTunes link below)

How involved is the Board when hiring a CFO?

How can a CFO hire go wrong?

How can a CFO going through a hiring process work through the CEO/Board dynamics?

What advice do you offer CFO candidates before their first interview?

If a CFO hire is going to happen, what is the time frame to make it happen?

How do you help CFOs with executive coaching?

What advice would you give a CEO trying to evaluate a CFO candidate?

What part do part-time CFOs play in the market today?

When is the right time for a company to hire their first real CFO?

Who engages an executive search firm for a CFO hire?

What advice do you have for senior finance executives that want to build relationships outside their business?

If any of these topics are of interest to you, you will find this podcast to be worth listening to. (29 minutes)

Which comments resonate most with you? Let me know what you think below, or email me.

The following is a summary of our interview with Sajid Malhotra, who was appointed CFO of Limelight Networks in April 2016, as announced in CFO Moves. Prior to being appointed CFO, Sajid was Chief Strategy Officer at Limelight Networks, and worked in strategy roles at Convergys, NCR Corporation and AT&T.

Samuel Dergel: Please tell us about what motivated you to become CFO

Sajid Malhotra: Professionally I recognized the higher responsibility and opportunity to assist in turning around the business. In my previous role as head of strategy, I could influence but this was clearly a lot more. The personal motivation was that I have a desire to assist other company Boards and being at a C-Level position would facilitate that goal.

SD: What challenges did you face becoming CFO when you were not classically trained for the role?

SM: I was at the right place at the right time. There was an abrupt departure of the CFO and I expressed interest to be the next CFO. I knew that the role would be a challenge but I felt, based on the underlying support team, there was low probability of failure and a very high probability of success. I felt I possessed the right skill set to turnaround the business for all stakeholders and wanted to take on the challenge of being a key member to turn a broken business into a successful one. Despite the position being outside of my comfort zone, I recognized, it was an opportunity I should not pass up.

SD: Did you find it challenging to move into the CFO role, acquire a new team and get the results that you need (or able to get them to perform)?

SM: I am a firm believer of not reducing workforces and in giving the incumbents the first chance. I believe keeping and motivating my team is the first order of business. My job is to make the team and the environment I inherit better. Over the course of my 30-year career, I have let the same principle guide me, regardless of the company, the industry or size.

SD: What do you feel are the key qualities for successful leadership?

SM: Leading by example, honesty and transparency, is a requirement. Leading by example and letting my team see how I interact with all around me, my sense of commitment and responsibility helps modify team behavior accordingly. People self-learn and perform.

SD: How important is it to have your people believe in you?

SM: Extremely important. I cannot do this alone. With my team, I can. My resume, experience and capabilities are important elements to getting a job but to be successful, it is all about the team working together towards a common goal and with a clear and unified purpose.

SD: How do you deal with change?

SM: I don’t think people handle change well in general. I have found that when you get the first series of changes and are successful, momentum picks up, employees attitudes change, and the trend becomes your friend.

SD: How are relationships important to you?

SM: Strategy and M&A are transactional roles. The CFO position requires higher engagement and entanglement, not just with the employees, but with vendors, customers, shareholders, community and competitors. I may have underestimated the amount of time investment required to be good at all this. It is a requirement for success.

SD: In your experience, what has been the difference between giving advice vs. taking advice?

SM: I always found it easy to give advice to CEOs, CFOs and boards but taking advice is 180 degrees different. Much, much easier to give and I have higher respect for those who constantly receive.

SD: How important is time management to a CFO?

SM: The CFO position requires a lot of time to do the job well and everyone is asking for your time. It is very easy to get buried in work if one does not manage time well and so, it is crucial to manage it well. We only have 24 hours in a day and time is an equalizer. Do a few things and do them well. Delegate the balance to trusted team members. Opportunities will only return what you invest in them.

SD: What advice do you have for contemporaries considering taking on the CFO role?

SM: Self-awareness as well as conviction are key. The CFO is the gatekeeper to the value vault. Do it well and you create value, do it poorly and you destroy value. Setting expectations and priorities before accepting the role rather than figuring them out after you have accepted the position is important. Ask for help. Take help. Leave personal biases at the door.

SD: Now that you’ve been CFO for over a year, what is your impression about the Office of the CFO?

SM: The CFO is most often the second most important role at any company, and for good reason. I find it an honor to be a CFO. I am temporarily occupying a position and an office. I need to make sure I don’t dilute the role for those who will follow me.

SD: Mark, you’re not like other CFOs. You have gone in and out of being CFO so many times, and because you’ve been on multiple sides of the board table, I felt it would be interesting to hear your perspective. So to start off – which job do you prefer – the CFO Job or the outside advisor job?

MM: It’s not as simple as that. I live to do two things – One is to advise founders and management teams, and the other is to do complex financial transactions. The thing that I liked about being a CFO at start-ups is that they were often in need of both. When I created SurePath Capital Partners, I created a company that only does both those things. When I had been a CFO and had been a close advisor to the CEO’s that I’d served and got to work on lots of transactions, then I’m a really happy guy. If I’m the CFO of a company and it’s well capitalized and were not doing acquisitions, and we’re not being acquired – if we’re just kind of running the ship, then that’s not so great for me.

Quick Takes from Mark on…

Thinking out of the CFO box

You need to go way beyond finance. You need to step up and fill other operating capacities.

Relationship between CEO and CFO

Synergy – if the CEO is the technical founder, take on the more outward-facing aspects; if the CEO is outward-facing and a rainmaker, try to take on as much of the internal operations as possible.

Create an informal network of your peers

There are always folks who are a little bit ahead of you in terms of scale and experience and complexity, and you can learn a ton from them. Branch out to other Venture funded CFOs.

Capable management

The whole thing about being a C-level executive in a venture backed company is that your competency and leadership need to scale faster than the company is scaling.

Keeping sight of the bigger picture

Remember to not only work IN the business, but to also work ON it. Similarly, to not just work IN yourself, but also to work ON yourself. Delegate lesser tasks to free up time to work on growing your capacity.

SD: Let’s talk about what it takes for a technology CFO to be successful. You’ve played that role, you’ve advised people in that role, what makes a successful Tech CFO?

MM: Well, I’d say it is the ability to go way beyond finance. I think, when a company isn’t fund raising, the financing role is pretty simple, and you have to find other ways to add value. Often the management teams at start-ups are incomplete and so there’s room to go way beyond finance and fill in other operating capacities. I’ve definitely done that a lot. I’d say within the finance realm, first of all you have to have a very clear understanding of all the nuts and bolts in the business, particularly because often those businesses are burning money and so you must understand ‘good burn’ vs ‘bad burn’. Most businesses these days hinges on profitable unit economics, and so even though the business as a whole might be in the red, if these customers are profitable, and you understand the nuances of customer mass, that’s kind of crucial. And then I would say the ability to translate. For example, if you’d just walk in to an exec meeting and rattle off a bunch of numbers and metrics, it’s sort of somewhat useful, but you have to go way deeper. As an example, if “churn” (the number of people who cancel your service) has moved in one direction, its somewhat useful to give the data points on the movement, but it is far more useful to understand the root cause and give good guidance. So again, it’s being able to go beyond the numbers.

The approach I’ve always taken to the CFO world is to define the role in a way that gives the CEO maximum leverage. What I mean by that is – if the CEO is very technical founder, then I’ve always tried to take on some of the outward facing aspects, so that the CEO would be able to be building and shipping product. Whereas if that CEO is a very outward facing CEO and a rainmaker, then I’ve tried to take on as much as the internal operations as possible, so that person could be out of the office and know that things are still running. To me the CFO is the right hand of the CEO, and therefore you have to govern yourself or kind of define the role in a way that has the most impact on the CEO.

SD: You’ve been a CFO on a full time basis and CFO on part time basis. What’s the difference?

MM: Huge difference. Again, take everything I’ve said about taking on more operating responsibility, in the context of full time. If you think about the core of a business – the core of any business in the technology business is building product and selling product, just to generalize. The rest is in support of that. In that context, finance is always important, but it’s not a core thing. It’s relatively horizontal. It can transfer the same functions from one company to the next. And so outsourcing the core nuts and bolts of finance makes all kind of sense. But where you run into trouble is when you outsource finance to someone, but then try to get that someone to do a whole bunch of other things – that just doesn’t work. So the big difference for me is that when I was full time I was going way beyond the finance role, whereas when I was part time I stuck to the core nuts and bolts of running a very tight back office, investor relations, budgeting, fundraising, reporting, etc.

SD: I’ve asked number of tech companies who are looking for finance help “what do you need?” and they said “well, we would like a Mark MacLeod”. You have a brand to you that says “start-up tech CFO”. How would you recommend they find their own Mark MacLeod?

MM: That’s a tough one. You know it’s funny. In retrospect, it might have taken the hard way to get my experience. My first start up was a client of mine and I came in with absolutely no experience and just kind of stumbled along. And because I was very focused on deals and fund raising in particular; if I didn’t feel like that company was on the trajectory to really grow massively, I’d move on. And that resulted in a bunch of things. I exited positively in a relatively short time frame, or me concluding that they weren’t going to be exiting in a relatively short time frame. But the point of all that is my learning and development was compressed and accelerated by moving to different companies and getting exposure to different start-ups, different stages in their life cycle, and that whole bit. So that’s one path.

I was very lucky because I got into start-ups very early, back in the late 90’s when anyone with a pulse was getting funded. The environment was pretty forgiving. So that could be a path today – someone who has kind of hustled around and has been involved in some fund raising, and has shown a propensity and an aptitude to be able to talk about things that are beyond the numbers.

But I’ll tell you… the whole thing about start-ups and venture capitalists is it’s all about the outliers. And while I’ve been part of some great businesses, the biggest learning opportunities and the biggest development, the most scope and the most exposure is when I was part of the outliers. Like Shopify and Freshbooks. So the point of that is hiring someone with that pedigree, even if they haven’t had the CFO title. If you’ve gone through Shopify’s growth, from 100 to 700 people, if you’ve gone through all the things that come with that and you understand how systems scale and you understand how to do really amazing investor reporting, and how to build sophisticated budgets and how to scale a finance function, that’s amazing experience. I’ve learned through trial and error that QuickBooks falls apart when you cross 100 employees. And then you end up having to go to a NetSuite or an Intact or something. Knowing that coming in, because you’ve come from a place with scale, would be pretty interesting.

So it’s really 2 different profiles. It is someone who is really helpful and has had some exposure through a few different companies so that they can pattern match. Or it’s someone who has come from a bigger company, one that the start-up aspires to be.

SD: Am I correct in saying that nobody can really hire Mark MacLeod because Mark learned it from the companies that he did the work in? I mean, you’re beyond that start-up age CFO that is young and has just enough experience but not too much, who’s not looking to take home too much cash and is more willing to put it down for the future. Do I understand that correctly?

MM: If someone wants to hire a Mark MacLeod, well a Mark MacLeod has been 2 decades in the making and is still being made, you know what I mean? They don’t exist. You have to hire someone who looks nothing like what I look like now. Hire someone who I was like 15-20 years ago, which means you’re really taking a chance. I got in because the environment was so frothy. And I would say that I stayed for 2 reasons – 1 maybe as you said, I don’t look like most CFO’s, because it’s never been just about the numbers for me, it’s always been about the strategic context around the numbers. So it was always the bigger picture. I’d say the thing that really helped make me stand out is I had a huge passion for venture capital. And for getting into the venture community and making deals happen. If a company is running out of money and hiring you helps them get money, then that should really sell itself. But in the early days that’s really how I got into a lot of start-ups. When I was doing the part time CFO stuff, the real sweet spot was that I would take companies and get them ready for the next round of funding, I would raise it for them, and then stay on as their CFO. That’s how I was kind of paying my way. So it’s a different context.

SD: What’s the ideal CFO for you to work with?

MM: I don’t know that there is just one to be honest. If I am helping a company fundraise or helping them prepare for an exit, I think that in both cases the deal will very much be driven by the strength of the management team. It’s not like I simply want a technician in there because I can handle the strategy stuff. I’d be more than happy to work with a very strategic deal-making CFO. I think that doing great big deals is a team sport, not like an individual hero sport. I think I’m equally happy to work with an internal deal maker, as I am to work with someone who’s got super tight back office. I think the takeaway is that one way or the other, we need both. So if the person is just the big deal maker and the back office is not super tight, that’s going to make it harder for me to do what I do. One way or another we have to have both the substance and the spot.

SD: What advice would you give to new CFOs who are just at the start of their career?

MM: Talk to peers a lot. There’s always folks who are a little bit ahead of you in terms of scale and experience and complexity, and you can learn a ton from them. You could also create an informal network, talking to other venture funded CFOs and the portfolio. Makes a ton of sense. I think this is true not just for CFOs but for any role. The whole thing about being a C-level executive in a venture backed company is that your competency and leadership has to scale faster than the company is scaling. And so in that context, having a coach who can help you work through issues and help you scale is super important as well.

SD: How did you make time for important things? Things that were related to your career and employer, but there was no deadline attached to it?

MM: I think I have a certain level of self-awareness. So I knew that I needed to not only work IN the business but also work ON it. And similarly to not just work IN myself, but to also work ON myself. I never have been the kind of technician who is always dotting I’s and crossing T’s. As a result I was able to push that kind of work down to the right level and that gave me capacity to work on growing my capacity, if that makes sense.

SD: Congratulations on your move to Amobee. What made you want to move there?

CF: I thought Amobee was an incredible opportunity. I’ve worked at a late-stage private that then went public. I’ve worked in Investment banking, consulting to those types of companies. My first CFO job was at Ubiquiti, which was a ride into the public company landscape. I thought Amobee was a great opportunity to work with a very late-stage private company (we are actually a division of SingTel) with aspirations of becoming our own public entity. I thought that really fit well for me.

SD: What are some of the challenges that you are excited about at Amobee?

CF: Amobee is a very young company, a product of 3 different transactions that have come together. My investment banking background has a lot to do with M&A, those types of transactions. These were 3 companies that needed to come together as a single operating unit on worldwide basis. I think it is going to be really interesting bringing them all together.

SD: What’s the size of the company right now?

CF: We have about 450 people currently, and doing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.

SD: What experiences have you had in the past that you feel will really help in your new opportunity?

CF: A long time ago, I worked for LoudCloud. They were a late-stage private company, and they were all over the place. It was a high growth company that was trying to find its sea legs in terms of an operating business model. You had an incredible amount of talent from a management stand point. There was a lot of great energy that went into the company. When I worked at LoudCloud, I saw the entire life cycle of the company right in front of your eyes. From a VC Start-up, it then became public company and the business model was challenged then we ended up selling. I thought it was great to live through both the entire up and down of a corporate infrastructure.

After leaving LoudCloud is that I went to business school to get more training. I had this great experience with LoudCloud, but I really wanted to consult to companies that were facing the same issues. How do you deal with High Growth? How do you deal with changing business environments? What’s the best path for exit? Those are key points of any company’s life cycle, and to be part of that was pretty empowering. I chose the banking path because I thought it would be the best way to work the most companies as quickly as possible.

SD: When did you realize that you wanted to become a CFO and that was the path that you wanted to take?

CF: I was really enjoying my banking career. I was the lead banker when we took Ubiquity Networks public, and I had a very good relationship with the management team. When Ubiquity was making a CFO change after the CFO announced he was resigning, I put in a number of candidates I knew from my time in banking. After they went through the candidates, they said “why don’t you take the job”.

At the time I really hadn’t considered the CFO path.

I think in the back of your mind when you’re doing investment banking you kind of wonder what the end game is. At some point you don’t want to be 60 years old and getting on a plane 7 days a week for hour long meetings. Some of the people in investment banking move into a corporate development role, some down cycle their investment banking and work for a smaller firm so they can have a little more career control.

When I heard about the opportunity, I said to myself that while I hadn’t really thought about the opportunity, the upside is absolutely tremendous. If I was thinking of an end game for my investment banking career, I couldn’t think of a better opportunity to walk into a multi-billion dollar company from Day 1 and assume the role of the CFO. It was the chance of a lifetime.

SD: You moved from investment banking to a CFO role where it wasn’t part of your plan but it was an exciting opportunity. What are some of the things that surprised you when you made that transition?

CF: I’ll tell you why I really liked the role, then I’ll tell you about what surprised me.

Everyone in investment banking sees themselves as a top tier McKinsey consultant, except they know a lot about finance. The issue is that when you’re in banking, you’re really not accountable for the end game of the deal. You’re putting two companies together from an M&A standpoint, but at the end of the day you don’t live with the transaction. The execution of the transaction becomes someone else’s problem. You can package an IPO, but you don’t live with the company and have to be there for the next 10 earnings cycles. You’re not empowered, and you don’t have much accountability passed the transaction.

As I started thinking about what I would like to do in my career, I thought that having 1000% accountability for transactions and decisions that you make would be really exciting.

That’s how I talked myself into that this is something I could do, and that I wanted to do.

I’ll tell you what my biggest concerns were – and then I’ll tell you what my biggest surprises were.

When I first started my career, I did public company accounting with PwC in New York. I did that for 3 years as entry level, early career kind of stuff. I then moved away from the core accounting. My initial concern was “how long would it take me to get back in the fold of day to day accounting operations so that I was comfortable signing the financial statements?”

I knew that was going to take a lot of effort on my side, besides the fact that the company had a lot of strategic and operational changes that they needed to make. It’s a line by line understanding of where the dollars are going before you can get comfortable. I had to lock myself up. It took me the better part of a couple of months to get to the point where I felt that I was extremely well versed where the company was and where it was going.

And then what surprised me was that you kind of think of a company as an entity, using a battleship analogy, where it’s really hard to turn a company because it has its own trajectory and culture. What I found was that in a company with 500 people or so, is that you can make impactful changes very quickly and that was the biggest surprise to me. You can come into a new organization with new ideas and make substantial changes and have them permeate all the way through the organization. And you can see the results almost instantaneously.

As an example, when I started, the company’s DSOs were in the high 60s. I was told that this was the industry standard that’s the way it’s done. We objectively looked at the problem and said there are ways to make some changes that will fundamentally change the way that we look at this, how we collect money and close the gap between what we’re getting paid and what we’re owed. At the best, the company got that down to 24 days. That was a substantial improvement.

One person can come in and really make a change for the better. I was a little bit naïve thinking that, regardless of the leadership, making change is very difficult within an established organization.

SD: CFOs are sometimes looked at as Mr. or Ms. “No”. How did you connect with your peers and what did you learn from that experience?

CF: I was fortunate that I did not walk into a situation where we had a tremendous amount of cash constraints. We were in a high growth mode, so it was more like “what is the most opportunistic way to leverage our spend so we can get higher returns”. Our recipe for success was making individual business units accountable for their time and expenses. Meaning, if you’re building an R&D project, how are you budgeting your time and the resources that you have, that meets the deliverables that are in front of you.

Plans change, projects change, scope changes. As long as there is a dialog and have a collaborative way to think about the end game, as long as there is accountability, everyone is on the same page. At the end of the day, you can say that either it was a successful venture or it wasn’t, and you have some way to benchmark it. It’s not that you’re sitting there saying no. You are empowering people so you can make the right business decisions.

SD: What career advice do you wish you were given before you started your MBA?

CF: I wish I had made the move to CFO sooner.

SD: How do you manage all those multiple goals that you want to be able to accomplish with only 24 hours in the day?

CF: We are around the world, so I use Skype a lot. I have a lot of business partners here, a team that supports me, and I’ve empowered them all, in certain aspects of the business, to affect change. I think they were a little bit afraid to do that, for fear that will be some ramifications of making those decisions. I’m using the leverage points that I have, which are the people that I work with. In some cases, I have seen some major gaps in the finance function that need to be automated, and we’re making investments to automate those. I believe we will be able to find a lot of efficiencies based on those two pieces.

SD: What do you find exciting about the environment at Amobee?

CF: Strategically as I was thinking about my next position, I wanted to get closer to software. I’ve been working in a hardware environment, and everything is software driven, even if it’s hardware. The differentiation is in the software layer. I wanted to get closer to a company that was using software to differentiate itself.

The industry that I work in, digital marketing for mobile, has a lot of “me too”. Our company is built on an analytical platform that allows you to analyze and justify your marketing spend against how it is being received in the field. I thought this was really empowering, and I like models that is extremely differentiating in a ‘me too’ environment. What I saw here is a company that has great technology, a very powerful sales engine, and needed a lot of help on the finance side to get things coordinated. For me, this is a project within a project within a project, and believe that if executed correctly, we can accomplish great things. I think this is a very exciting opportunity.

An article today in WSJ’s CFO Journal by Kimberly S. Johnson (Career Booster for CFOs: a Stint Abroad) discusses the opportunities that exist for finance executives in taking an overseas posting on their way to the CFO chair. The article is well written and researched, and has many positive points to consider for finance executives on the rise.

You may remember playing snakes and ladders as a youngster. The article makes it seem like an overseas posting is a ladder to get you to the top. I have seen instances that it has been such a ladder for up and coming finance executives.

But beware. What very well looks like a ladder could be a snake that gets you to slide down and out.

In my experience as executive search consultant, I have spoken with a number of disillusioned finance executives locked out of the most senior roles in an organization because they took an overseas role thousands of miles from head office.

From my perspective, one of two things happened. These finance executives either lost the opportunity to move up by being so far away from decision making, or they were pushed there because senior management did not consider the executive the “A” player they thought they were.

Opportunity or Kiss of Death? Ladder or Snake?

Here are some pointers.

Have the conversation – know what is expected of your time overseas. Listen and ask questions, especially for what comes after the posting. Only hearing vague promises of great things after your stint is not enough. You need to understand what is expected of you during your tour of duty, and what the plan is after. Also, have the conversation as to what knowledge, skills and experiences you should obtain during your expatriate experience, and how they are needed to “complete you” for your next tasks ahead. Oh, and get it in writing – who you speak with about the plan to leave and return may no longer be with the company when it is time to come back.

Stay close – In Guide to CFO Success, I discuss the importance of relationships to your success with your employer. Your Relationship Map will be a key tool to ensuring that you continue to manage the important relationships needed for your success overseas. Being in the corporate loop is difficult enough when everyone you need to speak with is down the hallway. Being an multiple times zones away makes staying close that much harder, and critically more important.

Impact your success – Use this as an opportunity for to impact your three critical career success factors (discussed in my recent book). Plan how this new posting will impact your Brand. Network inside and outside your company is more important than ever, and maintaining your visibility takes a lot planning and effort.

If you are offered an overseas move, don’t just jump at the offer. Make sure the move will land you on a ladder, not a snake.

The office and the role of the Chief Financial Officer continues to evolve.

This evolution may cause apprehension in some seasoned CFOs. These experienced financial executives feel this way because, in part, they have worked very hard to get to where they are. They believe that their past experience and success should speak to their future opportunities.

Yet for any executive, especially one in the finance side of the business, resting on your laurels is so 1980s.

The world is changing at a rapid pace, and the business world is either leading this change or trying hard to stay ahead. Organizations that do not continue to stay relevant wither up and disappear into obscurity. Ditto for CFOs.

Cindy Kraft, a CFO career coach, works with CFOs who want to stay ahead of the curve in their career. I like her work, and am always happy to refer senior finance executives to her. As a fellow blogger, she and I agree most of the time. In recent posts (here and here) she discusses technology and its relevance to CFO careers.

The statistics from Cindy’s questions on whether technology should be in the domain of Finance is interesting. I believe the results would be more telling if there was corresponding information on company size. From my experience, companies of a smaller size have CFOs responsible for IT, while larger companies have an executive in charge of Technology.

From my vantage point, CFOs who are able to stay ahead of the changes in the business world, including technology, are able to continue to stay relevant and add value.

Corporate value comes from making great decisions. Decisions based on analysis rather than gut is where Finance and the CFO have the ability to make a difference at the executive table. Technology is just a tool that helps intelligent people make great decisions.

CFOs need to be a Strategists, Leaders and Advisors to their businesses. If a CFO is not helping the company make decisions and adding value to the organization, they are not a Strategist, not a Leader and not an Advisor. In essence, they are not a real CFO.

To continue to be a real Chief Financial Officer today, you need to be able to help your organization make the best decisions possible.

The term Big Data has been bandied about as the cure-all for corporations. Technology vendors are very happy to use the term to get attention and their portion of corporate spending. But data itself is not enough, no matter how big the data is.

The Data Value Chain illustrates that data is only the beginning. It is the usable information that is pulled from this data, viewed through the lens of intelligence, either human or artificial (or both), that wisdom can be obtained.

As CFO, it is your duty to provide wisdom to your organization. This wisdom will lead to the creation of corporate value. Analytics is the point where you turn all that data into valuable decisions.

If you’re not providing the wisdom you would like (or think that you should) to the rest of the business, understand why that is.

Is it because…

You do not have the tools?

You do not have the people? Or,

You do not know where to start?

As CFO, no one expects you to be intimately aware of the available tools and be able to analyse this yourself. However, as CFO, you are only as good as your finance team allows you to be.

As CFO, no one expects you to choose the right analytical tools by yourself. As CFO, no one expects you alone to do the analysis necessary to come to great decisions. However, as CFO, you need to make sure your team can support you in this value added activity. As CFO, understand the power of these tools and information yourself of what they can do. Then you need to guide, lead and develop the team necessary to do so.

I had the pleasure of meeting RK Paleru at the AICPA CFO Conference last May. RK is the Analytics guru (Executive Director, Systems Analytics and Insights Group) to the CFO at George Washington University.

RK blogged about an article I shared with him about the idea of companies hiring a Chief Analytics Officer. While I do not think that most companies are ready to create another seat at the executive table, I do think that Analytics can add tremendous value to the executive table. I am certain that the CFO of GWU thinks that the analytics that RK does bring tremendous value to the CFO, as well as adding significant value to the institution and its mission.

Anders Liu-Lindberg wrote recently about his take on Analytics within the finance function. Anders, from where he sits in his role as Regional Finance Business Partner at Maersk Line, sees corporate value ONLY IF the talent team is built properly within finance is able to partner with the generalist functions. Finance should act as a true business partner to the business, helping make decisions at all levels of the business.

CFOs who do not continue to improve, change and learn will, as mentioned earlier, wither. Resting on laurels is career limiting.

If, as CFO, your response to “Analytics” is “Analytics, Shmanalytics”, you’re not only missing the boat, you’re doing a disservice to your employer and your team.

To remain CFO, both today and tomorrow, both within your company and at your next employer, understand the power of Analytics. Then, ensure you develop and nurture a finance team that can give you the wisdom to help your company make great decisions.

What is interesting about the popularity of this post is that the visits have been mostly from Google searches and other blog postings. Posted in 2011, this is still going strong. Ideas from this blog were further developed in Guide to CFO Success.

It seems that CFOs are looking for onboarding advice, because this continues to be a popular topic with search engines. The popularity of this topic ensured that it was addressed further in Guide to CFO Success.

My presentation in Vancouver in 2012 continues to be a popular point of entry into my blog and website. Someone somewhere referred to it, and this person must be very influential.

With 2015 about to start, I am pleased to continue the development of content and programs that benefit the CFO and the organizations they are committed to. I am excited about the CFO Peer Groups I will be facilitating this coming year, as well as having the opportunity to help organizations hire and develop the best senior financial talent for their needs.

I see, speak with and come across many focused senior finance executives that plan and prepare their career to be in the right place at the right time who are ready to become CFO for the first time.

Yet a number of senior finance executives become CFOs by accident. A typical scenario I have seen is ‎where a company CFO leaves (this is usually unplanned for by the company), and the CEO and Board need to make a quick decision as to what to do to fill their CFO spot. In these situations, they decide (again, without much planning and foresight), to make one of their senior finance executives the new Chief Financial Officer.

As someone who helps companies hire the best CFO for their needs, my opinion is that this is not always the best solution for the company. However, these are companies that do not have a business relationship with me (yet), so they haven’t asked me for my opinion. I’m not saying that this is a bad solution. In fact, it could be a great solution for the company. I am saying that the probability is that if they haven’t done any proper succession planning for this important role, they may be making a strategic and costly error by hiring the wrong person as CFO.

Whatever the situation for the company, it is up to the newly promoted CFO to make sure that the company made the right choice, if only so that this new CFO can truly benefit from this unplanned career opportunity.

Here is some advice for the senior finance executive that finds themselves as a newly appointed, yet accidental, CFO.

[You will see links to previous blog posts that touch on these subjects. For a more comprehensive overview of how these subjects relate to the success of a CFO, I recommend reading my book, Guide to CFO Success]

Relationship Management – This is the biggest area of change for the new CFO. Whatever your role was prior to your ascension to the CFO throne, you now have to deal with new relationships.

Plan – Too many senior finance executives I have spoken with that have been promoted to the CFO chair, when asked how their role has changed since their promotion, tell me that their job hasn’t changed much. This people are missing a critical opportunity. You must plan for any new role as CFO. You also must know what is expected from a real CFO.

Development – You may not have planned to become CFO so soon, or at all. But now that you are CFO, what are you doing to further your development to become the best CFO you can be? In my book, I recommend that CFOs negotiate a Professional Development spending account that can allow them to pay for the courses, coaching and conferences they need to become a better and more productive CFO.

Coaching – I find that the Chief Financial Officers that I work with in executive coaching are motivated to become even better CFOs. I truly believe that most CFOs would benefit from having a confidential confidant and coach to help them better focus, improve and plan for their success. For a new CFO who didn’t plan to become one so quickly, if at all, having an executive coach can make a big difference on the way to become a successful CFO for the company your work for today, and to your future employers as well.

If you are an accidental CFO, or may find yourself in this position one day, take these recommendations to heart. You may be fortunate to find yourself in the CFO chair, but do not squander this wonderful opportunity.

Numerous CFO research studies, surveys, roundtables, panel discussions and webinars bring up the talent topic again and again.

Talent is a challenge for the CFO.

I have had a successful speaking circuit this past spring, including panel discussions in New York and Toronto, webinars to diverse groups of finance professionals (CPA Canada and APQC), and presentations in Washington and Baltimore. The talent conversation keeps coming up again and again.

“Talent availability—and costs. Finding and developing the right talent is invariably a top agenda item for transitioning CFOs. In fact, when we ask CFOs what they would like their legacy to be, a large number actually talk about leaving a sustainable organization that can foster finance talent. To get there means identifying people not only with the necessary skill sets, but also intangibles—such as curiosity and the ability to team—that will help finance become a better business partner. It comes at a cost, though, in terms of developing effective performance management systems, compensation systems, training programs, and coaching. And while human resources should be the natural support organization in all these areas, CFOs often find they have to rely on their own teams to do the work. Still, without the right people in place, there are bigger costs: the inability to execute on a CFO’s critical initiatives and a lack of good finance ambassadors throughout the organization.”

My CFO Advisors, in my blog earlier this year titled The Sleepless CFO, listed talent as one of the top 3 things that keep them awake at night.

The CFO Relationship Map (mentioned in previous blogs, and in more detail in Guide to CFO Success), shows that CFOs rely on their Finance Team to support them to become the best CFO they can be. Yet CFOs continue to have challenges with talent.

Talent challenges for the CFO include:

Not having the right talent they need today

Not having a talent plan for the future

Not aligning the talent in the finance team to meet the real needs of the organization

Not using career planning to keep, motivate and develop the best finance talent

Inefficient or ineffective hiring processes for the talent needed today and tomorrow

Not having an effective relationship with HR to positively impact the finance team

Talent is an opportunity for the CFO

Yet, with all these talent challenges, the CFO has a great opportunity make a significant impact. These challenges are not insurmountable, they just need attention.

CFOs that pay attention to these issues, even if not getting perfect scores, are in a position to have a significant impact on their personal success, the success of the people that work for them, and the entire organization.

First of all, thank you for taking the time to speak with the AESC and BlueSteps about the CFO role and your new book, Guide to CFO Success. Can you tell us about the work you do at Stanton Chase International?I work in executive search, with a focus on the Office of Finance. Working across the United States and Canada, as part of our CFO and Financial Executive Practice, I help companies hire their next Chief Financial Officer, and work with CFOs to build a finance team that will ensure their success. In addition to working with CFOs and other Financial Executives, I do executive coaching.In your book, you talk about the reality of the CFO role vs. what the CFO role is perceived to be. How do you define the CFO role?The role of the Chief Financial Officer is a critical one for all organizations. The Board and the CEO set the expectations for the CFO, and it is important for the CFO to deliver on these expectations. In essence, the role of the CFO is whatever the company deems it to be.Guide to CFO Success focuses on all stages of the CFO’s career, from searching for a new executive job to building out her team. Which career stages are most CFOs unprepared for when managing their careers?Career transition. CFOs may be well trained to be great CFOs, but no Chief Financial Officer has been trained to become a CFO in Transition. My experience shows that CFOs who are focusing on their career at the same time as their CFO role for their employer are at an advantage over those that just give 110% to their employer. CFOs who continue to develop themselves and network properly throughout their career minimize the chances that they will ever be in transition, or, if they end up in between opportunities, their network will quickly activate to their advantage.

Other questions answered in this interview include:

What has changed about the CFO role in the last 5-10 years? How have long-standing CFOs adapted to these changes?

In your book, you discuss in transition CFOs and the best ways to cope with searching for a new position. What advice do you have for CFOs who are currently in transition?

How can a CFO candidate best present himself to get noticed by executive recruiters in today’s marketplace?

In your book, you highlight the importance of “critical early wins” for a newly hired CFO. What should a new CFO focus on during the first few days and months on the job?

A major theme in your book focuses on the importance of focusing on one’s own career even when happily employed. Why is it important for CFOs to focus on both their career and their employer?

Do you have any recommendations for CFOs who have difficulty finding the time to focus on their career while they’re employed?

One unique thing about your book is that you focus on the CFO as a leader rather than the CFO as the technical, number cruncher. A significant part of being a leader is maintaining strong relationships. Which relationships do most CFOs find to be the most difficult and what recommendations do you have for CFOs to navigate those rocky relationships?

What changes should CFOs prepare for in the next 5-10 years? What new skills might they need? What will they need to be able adapt to in the workplace?